You wake from a scream - but it is not your own.

The night is still and silent, and the darkness had fallen onto the lavish chambers like a funerary shroud. The cold air bites at your skin when you shift upright, eyes picking out the lines of your wife's silhouette.

Golden Cheese sits hunched, as though crushed by the weight on her shoulders, and the linen of her nightshirt sticks to her back. She feels too hot and too cold, all at once. Her face is uncomfortably wet, and her lips tremble, and her heart beats do fast it is painful.

Vestiges of her nightmare linger in her mind, too real and unreal all at once as she tries to level her breathing. Images slip through her fingers like dashed fog, but the dread - oh, it lingers.

Even her golden dream of the ever-gleaming city can not save her from her own memories. From her own failures.

Her kingdom was razed to the ground, her people dead -- and all because she let them. How they live now is but a ephemeral comfort, a consolation prize for her incompetence, and she feels sick to her stomach for it. She'd went against all law of life and nature, taken their souls and used them and--

..She feels your eyes on her, and turns. For a moment, there is no sound but the ragged rasps of her breathing, and the deafening pounding of her heart - only she thinks of none of that.

You're here, the thought flits through her mind, and it's a comfort. You're here.

She reaches out to find your hand among the sheets, as though she cannot quite believe in it until she's touched you.